Bloggers vs. Terrorists? | Danger Room | Wired.com #hacktivist UNITE

Bloggers vs. Terrorists?

• By Nicholas Thompson
• August 3, 2007  | 
• 3:24 pm  | 
• Categories: Crime and Homeland Security, Info War

There’s a smart piece up at the Post Global blog on ways to counter terrorists that tracks fairly close with the sort of political containment I blogged about the other day.

The core of the post is about ways to win the intellectual battle with our enemies. How do you make it so that fewer and fewer people are drawn to the ideology of terrorists? This has perhaps been the biggest failure of the current administration in the war on terror.

One simple, and perhaps futile, suggestion from the Post Global folks is to start joining the conversation on terrorist websites. They seem to suggest that, if you speak Arabic and know your religious theory, you should go on jihadist blogs and argue, say, that the Koran doesn’t condone violence.

I’d love it if this were true. A thousand bloggers with good translation software doing the work of two thousand policemen! But knowing about the flame wars that break out when you defend Windows on a Mac blog, I’m not sure it’d do much good to defend Thomas Jefferson on a jihadist blog. Has anyone ever seen the strategy in action?

Tags: Homeland Security, Info War

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